“This case presents the hard issue of balancing the protection of students’ rights and that of personal privacy when using school bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other intimate facilities, while ensuring that no student is unnecessarily marginalized while attending school”, wrote O’Connor, who was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2007 and sits in Fort Worth, Texas.
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Texas and four other Republican-led states filed another lawsuit Tuesday seeking to roll back the Obama administration’s efforts to strengthen transgender rights, saying new federal nondiscrimination health rules could force doctors to act contrary to their medical judgment or religious beliefs.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty represented Hobby Lobby in the 2014 Supreme Court of the United States case, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, in which the Court determined that select for profit businesses could cite religious religious beliefs as a reason to deny contraception coverage.
A statement from the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says this is not a regulatory change but is actually an unconstitutional re-writing of the law.
The United States District Courthouse located in downtown Wichita Falls was also the site chosen for several states to sue the government for opening school bathrooms to transgender students.
“The federal government has no right to force Texans to pay for medical procedures created to change a person’s sex”, Paxton wrote in a statement.
“It can not be disputed that the plain meaning of the term sex” in that law “meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth”, the judge wrote.
They broadly affect the health care system because providers who accept federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid, have to comply.
The health care providers and the state are claiming that the federal government is redefining the term “sex” to “thwart decades of settled precedent” and impose “massive new obligations” on health care providers. Under the new rule, a physician that believes that certain treatments are not in a patient’s best medical interests may be in violation of federal law.
“Although HHS was asked to include a religious exemption in the regulation due to the obvious implications for religious healthcare providers, HHS declined to do so, stating instead that religious objectors could assert claims under existing statutory protections for religious freedom”, the lawsuit says.
The ruling prevents the U.S. Department of Education from implementing guidance that required school districts to allow transgender students to choose which restroom and locker facilities to use. And a physician that, for religious or conscientious reasons can not perform a particular procedure, chooses to instead refer a patient to another health care provider may also be determined to be in violation of this new rule.
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“The only thing a doctor is obliged to do is treat all patients, including trans patients, with dignity and respect and to make treatment decisions free from bias”, Weiss said.
